How Child’s Play migrated from Airtable to Softr, cutting costs by 50% with a system built to scale

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The Problem

Child's Play Charity funds therapeutic gaming and technology for pediatric hospitals, running three funding cycles a year across 190+ partner hospitals and their foundations. Those cycles include an Annual Gift, an Equipment Grant (around $50K per award, competitive), and a Capacity Grant (around $200K per award, multi-year). 

The organization is only six people, and as Garrett Goody, Pediatric Gaming Technology Manager, put it, “we punch above our weight class as far as the amount of money we're giving out.” The tooling didn't match that scale. Grant intake ran on Foundant, a vertical grant management product. Hospital and foundation records lived in Airtable, behind an external-facing Softr portal, and everything else ran through spreadsheets, Word templates, and email. 

The team tracked eligibility and compliance by hand, reconciled disbursements manually, and rebuilt contact lists in spreadsheets for every outreach. Nobody had a single view of a hospital's history across funding cycles.

The team needed to rebuild, and they needed a system that could:

• Be a single system for internal and external users: Hospitals needed one place to apply, report, and get paid. The internal team needed one place to review, score, disburse, and communicate without leaving the platform.
• Run on a database built for scale and complexity: Airtable's 5-requests-per-second API limit and record caps limited what the existing Softr portal could do, and every interaction added an API hop that users felt as lag. The team also needed one data model to support all three grant types, including multi-year grants.
• Fix what Foundant and Airtable couldn't: Foundant worked “about 70% the way we wanted,” Garrett said, but everything else became a workaround. The team needed automated eligibility and compliance gating that blocks an out-of-compliance or incomplete hospital from applying, and tells it why, without anyone checking by hand.

The Solution

Child's Play already ran its Annual Gift portal on Softr and Airtable. When the team set out to rebuild the full platform — grant application through disbursement, across three grant types — Base Flows, a Softr enterprise agency, made the case for moving the entire data layer to Softr Databases.

Base Flows migrated the data in three weeks, freezing the Airtable base, importing it as a mirror, redesigning the schema, then validating every record against the original before cutting over. The database has since grown to 35 tables and 7,500+ records.

The new Softr platform runs all three grant cycles for roughly 880 hospital and foundation users on the front end, with the internal Child's Play team running review and operations.

From the portal, hospital and foundation users can:

• See only what's relevant to their role: Foundation users see every hospital they support, hospital users see only their own hospital, and Game Tech users have no access to grant information. Everyone logs in with a magic link or one-time code on Child's Play's own subdomain — no separate credentials to manage.
• Apply for grants across all three cycles: Users submit the Annual Gift application, the Equipment Grant application, or the multi-year Capacity Grant application, with hospital profile data pre-filled and eligibility checked automatically. This means a hospital sees upfront whether or not it can apply before the application starts.
• Save and resume drafts as a team: Any user from the same hospital can pick up and finish a colleague's in-progress application instead of starting over.

Internally, the Child's Play team can:

• Open a new grant cycle without a developer: New funding cycles — or one-off, invite-only programs — are records in Softr Databases, not new table builds.
• Score, simulate, and set award thresholds: Reviewers score applications through a two-round process, and the team runs budget simulations by bed-size tier before finalizing.
• Generate disbursements from approved records: Roughly 200 annual gift disbursements are generated in a single batch by bed-count tier, and application-linked disbursements pull the approved dollar amount instead of a retyped number.
• Send signed grant agreements through DocuSign: Award data pre-fills into locked contract fields, routes to the grantee and then the Executive Director, and signing status writes back to the grant record automatically, so there’s no re-typing numbers between systems. All of this happens in Softr Workflows.
• Send trackable applicant communications: A campaigns and outreach tool sends targeted messages by grant cycle, application status, and role. More than 1,385 have been sent so far, each one verifiable, replacing Foundant email reminders that Garrett said, “sometimes just didn't run.”

The Impact

Child's Play now has one system of record that it never had before, and it cancelled subscriptions to both Airtable and Foundant, cutting its software costs by ~50%.

Key results so far:

• 193 hospitals served this year, up from 162: The same six-person team served 31 more hospitals this year, because eligibility and compliance are now enforced automatically instead of checked by hand.  
• Equipment Grant scoring time cut from three weeks to one: The system shaves two weeks off this grant process, with the final funding decision now taking an hour of meeting time instead of a full day.
• Capacity Grant cycle built and ready ahead of its January 2027 launch: The charity’s most complex grant cycle, with multi-year disbursements tied to hiring anniversaries, can now run smoothly from one system. 

“On top of saving us time and money, we have a much clearer picture of dollars requested vs. served, and a better tool to forecast for next year backed by actual data and not just our gut feeling,” said Garrett.

Child's Play's database, portal, and workflows — including DocuSign automations — now run on a single governed platform, with a full audit trail and data export on demand. That gave the Board what it needed to sign off without a formal IT review.

And Garrett has kept expanding the platform on his own: he now writes his own Vibe Coding Blocks and DocuSign workflows, turning the Base Flows build into ongoing product co-development, without the rate limits, record caps, cost, or workarounds that came with Airtable and Foundant.

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